Dark Champion (Flirting with Monsters #4) - Eva Chase Page 0,74

skimmed the deck by mere inches, but I wrenched myself up and around fast enough to clock him in the back of the head.

He teetered but caught himself and whirled around to leap after me. The singing hadn’t boosted my spirits as much as I’d hoped—or really at all. Gritting my teeth against another waft of flame, I scrambled across the netting. I kicked Omen in the shoulder, let out a hiss when he hauled on my leg so hard he almost dislocated my hip, and finally made it within jumping distance of the opposite railing.

“Come on, Disaster,” the hellhound shifter said, hurtling after me. His voice was taut, his face set in an expression that looked as uneasy as it did fierce. “Is this how you’re going to fight all those Company bastards and the sphinx who’s egging them on—by running away? Didn’t they kill your guardian? How many more are you going to let them murder?”

“I’m not running away,” I snapped, and reversed course to throw an uppercut he neatly avoided. My sneakers squeaked on the metal bar. “Isn’t it called fighting smart?”

“Doesn’t look so smart to me. We don’t have time for pussyfooting around the problem now, do we?”

“I know that.” Holy humping harpies, was he pissing me off. Even more fire crackled through me. Every muscle in my body went rigid, holding it in. “I’ll be ready.”

“Are you sure? You’ve got to tackle it head on, before we come right down to the wire. Maybe I shouldn’t expect any better from a being who’s only half—”

Before he could even finish that sentence, the fire blazed up so sharp and sudden my vision hazed. All I could see was the glare of the flames; all I could feel was every inch of my skin sizzling and charring. The pain shocked the air from my lungs.

A solid force slammed into me. I crashed into the placid ocean head first, salty water bubbling to a boil around me for an instant before it doused the flames.

I came up sputtering—and feeling the prickle of raw patches all across my skin. My ponytail drifted over my shoulder into view, its tip burnt black. Nausea pooled in my stomach.

Omen had tossed himself into the water along with me. He shook the moisture from his hair in a gesture that was undeniably dog-like and glanced over me with a gaze that was all man, lit with his own orange heat. His mouth twisted.

“That was a low blow,” he said. “It should have been beneath me.”

It took me a second to process that he was apologizing and another to realize the apology was for the comment that had provoked my inferno, not for the unexpected swim. I glanced up at the boat, taking in the scorch marks streaking across the mottled paint, and my stomach lurched again.

I’d almost burnt up our sole mode of transportation with no land in sight, and Omen was apologizing to me.

My tongue turned leaden in my mouth. I’d failed. I’d been a fucking disaster.

But what was the point in talking about that when Omen knew it just as well as I did?

After a fumble for words, what fell from my mouth was, “Well, now we’re both beneath the boat. Maybe we should fix that?”

Thorn had flown down from the mast. As he leaned over the railing, the smoldering darkness cleared from his eyes and his wings vanished. A moment later, Ruse and Snap joined him, looking equally worried. Now we had a whole party celebrating my ineptitude. Wonderful.

Omen swam closer to me. The damp darkened his eyelashes, making his gaze even more piercing, but it wasn’t chilly right now. Treading water, he examined one of my forearms and then the other.

The red patches were already fading back into their usual pink. “Your healing abilities are heightening as quickly as your fire is,” he remarked.

“Oh, joy. More time to burn alive if there’s no convenient ocean to throw me into.”

His eyes met mine, stormy with an emotion I couldn’t read. “Maybe I’ve been going about this wrong.”

“What do you mean?” What fresh hell did he have in store for me now?

But he brushed his fingertips over my soaked hair, sparking a much more welcome heat, and it occurred to me that he might be worried about me too, however much trouble he had showing it.

“I’ve been trying to push you to the brink,” he said. “Get you used to the sensation so you can control it. But maybe this power